My bid for a pair of tickets to Burning Man 2012 for myself any my beloved was successful! Most of the burners that registered in the main sale lottery were not as lucky.
The Burning Man Organization put up 40,000 tickets in the main sale lottery that concluded yesterday. All of those tickets were distributed, and now the cries of discontent are rippling through burner circles across the world.
Spin Cycle Camp set up a survey regarding the ticket lottery. You can participate here: http://isopop.com/2012/02/
Seems like a consistent 33% success (67% failure) rate among respondents. That rate jives with the experience of my own camp having only 2 of the 6 of us who registered for the lottery ‘winning’ their tickets.
I’m not a statistician, but can anything be inferred from this success rate to estimate the total number of lottery registrations? I think it’s possible that over 100,000 registrations were in the lottery system requesting around 170,000 tickets! That is incredible!
There are already scalpers posting ads on StubHub and Ebay (DO NOT PATRONIZE THESE SELLERS) for tickets at obscene prices. It will be very interesting to see what the Secure Ticket Exchange Program (STEP) looks like. If there isn’t a glut of unwanted tickets available through STEP, then the event truly just hit an inflection point. The culture dynamics will be instantaneously affected. Will it be for better or worse? That is the question.
Congrats on getting your BM tix! I got lucky enough to get into the STEP program before it closed…and crossing my fingers that it’ll actually pull through. Not betting on it, but hey, a chance is better than none, right? 🙂